NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 29, 2026

● What is the result when some of the worst journalism about child welfare and some of the worst political demagoguery about child welfare happen in the same place? The mother of all foster-care panics. And that panic may well have contributed to the latest child abuse death in Santa Clara County, California. I have a blog post about the enormous harm done to children by the Silicon Valley foster-care panic – and who is responsible. The post includes a link to an excellent story from The Imprint on one key aspect of this tragedy – the closure of the provider of family defense in the county. 

● The second-worst example of political demagoguery about child welfare at the moment is coming from the Attorney General of New Mexico (see our recent Issue Brief). With everyone feeling the pressure to look tough, the state appears headed toward further ratcheting up the danger to children. In a column for the Albuquerque Journal, Layal Bou Harfouch, a drug policy expert for the Reason Foundation, writes: 

Under the proposed rules [to implement a new state law], any pregnant patient who admits to substance use, including prescribed medications or legal substances such as alcohol, tobacco or marijuana, can be required to comply with a Plan of Safe Care (POSC), including mandatory substance use treatment, even in the absence of a clinical assessment or diagnosis. Families accessing medication-assisted treatment, like methadone or buprenorphine, would be subject to the same requirements as those using illicit substances. Families deemed “noncompliant” with these plans can be referred directly to the Children, Youth and Families Department for assessment, bypassing the multilevel response system outlined in [the new state law]. 

● Meanwhile, Source NM reports that the author of a report from the Attorney General, which accused the state child welfare agency of supporting family preservation “at almost any cost” and of being guilty of a “systemic moral failing,” says NCCPR’s response is “not only misguided, but hyperbolic.” You be the judge. 

● Want to know why New York State – and every state – needs a Family Miranda law, so families know their rights when the family police pound on the door? Read this account, in the Albany Times Union, of what an investigation of a false report did to one family. 

● The Imprint interviewed Rowan Wilson, the chief judge of New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals. Asked about public misconceptions about foster care and child welfare, he replied: 

There are a few. One is that unless you are sort of putting your child in danger by abusing the child or something like that, your child can’t be taken away from you. That’s not true. You can lose your child for various reasons, a lot which have to do with poverty.  

If you’re middle-class and you’ve got a child who shoplifts something, you’ll take care of that — you’ll go to the store, you’ll deal with the person, you’ll pay them, and the thing is never going to wind up in the criminal justice system. If not, your child is apprehended, and things start to snowball. You may be in public housing, and the fact that your child is found with a small amount of marijuana — not any longer, but previously — may then disentitle you from public housing. So now you’re in a shelter. There are all sorts of snowball effects like this that disproportionately affect poor people and result in their children being taken away. …

● Still another review of the ever-growing mass of evidence shows that Judge Wilson is right. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concludes: 

When parents have enough money to pay their bills, buy nutritious food, and spend quality time with their children, they are better able to respond to their children’s needs and create a nurturing home, something every child deserves. 

Supporting families and improving economic security have many benefits, including reducing near-term hardship among families with children. Evidence from a wide range of income support programs also shows another important benefit — reducing involvement in the child welfare system. 

By now you’d have to be willfully blind to think otherwise. But, unfortunately, in “child welfare,” where so much is in short supply, willful blindness exists in abundance. 

● ChildTrends reports that their new analysis of federal data 

… shows that parental drug use is a factor in roughly one in three children’s entry into foster care, although the rate of children entering care for this reason is at its lowest since 2009. 

What that also means is that, contrary to the impression those same willfully blind fearmongers try desperately to leave, in two-thirds of entries into foster care, parental drug abuse was not a factor.

● The “child welfare” system has long been obsessed with adoption by strangers as the only “real” form of permanence for children. Never mind that we don’t even know how often these adoptions fail.  But this Associated Press story offers some alarming clues. From the story: 

An Associated Press investigation finds that a business known for tough-love boarding schools for rebellious, rich teenagers has also set its sights on a different demographic: adopted kids. Experts say adoptees, only 2% of American children, account for an estimated 25-40% of those in residential treatment. 

Adoptees told the AP they believe they’ve been enmeshed in a shadow orphanage system where children end up with the very fate that adoption was supposed to spare them — promised ‘forever homes’ but institutionalized instead, some for years, in oppressive and sometimes abusive facilities. … 

Police reports reveal children as young as 9 experience or witness violence, chaos, self-harm and sexual abuse inside facilities. Adoptees and adoptive parents said children left more traumatized than when they arrived — if, that is, they ever left. Some have died inside the facilities that promised they would keep them safe. … 

The industry no longer relies exclusively on the checkbooks of wealthy parents. The COVID-19 pandemic prompted more bipartisan political support for youth mental health funding, bolstering programs that tap public taxpayer dollars via healthcare, child welfare, juvenile justice and school systems. 

Two footnotes: The estimate that 25 to 40% of those in residential treatment are adoptees does not mean that 25 to 40% of adoptive placements fail, only that adoptees are overrepresented among the institutionalized. And those adoptees include many who were not adopted from foster care. 

● Even when the adoption doesn’t fail, often it still means cutting children off not only from parents but also extended family, friends, teachers, classmates and often even siblings. It’s permanence on paper, but for the child welfare establishment, that’s all that counts. In Youth Today, Molly Bernard, a youth connections advocate with Raise the Future, argues that it’s time to emphasize not paper permanence but the real thing. She writes: 

Legal permanency has long been the goal of the child welfare system. But too often, it fails to deliver what young people actually need: lasting, supportive relationships that continue into adulthood. 

● In 2024, Minnesota passed a law that does little more than require counties, which run family policing in that state, to get serious about helping families so their children don’t endure the trauma of needless foster care. In the state’s largest county, Hennepin, it may already be showing success. But what’s really startling about this article in The Imprint, is that what the law demands hasn’t been standard operating procedure all along. And yet, now rural counties are whining about how being given a mere three years to prepare to do their jobs isn’t enough and the law should be delayed. 

● The Trump Administration’s persecution of immigrants extends to children, of course. Whether they crossed the border alone or were swept up in raids targeting their parents, some are institutionalized, sometimes in the same institutions that family police agencies use for foster youth. One of those places was Children’s Village in Dobbs Ferry, NY. Now, CNN reports, Children’s Village 

faces allegations of physical abuse, including placing some children in isolation in a so-called “red room,” according to multiple sources who spoke with CNN about what’s unfolded at the shelter. 

One teen who was transferred to another facility recalled spending four days alone in what he described as a “red room” with a red light and no door, according to an account shared with a shelter clinician in early January and reviewed by CNN . … 

Over those four days, the teen said he didn’t bathe and was only provided bread for food. The boy said the room was located near the shelter’s security staff office, so personnel could monitor him while he was confined to the room. 

The teen also recalled a so-called “special” unit that would swoop in when fights occurred or restraints were required. He said he was thrown to the floor and hit, as well as placed in restraints, nearly two dozen times. 

Even Trump’s Office of Refugee Resettlement is investigating the allegations, which Children’s Village denies. Children’s Village is no longer housing migrant children. It still houses foster youth.

Did a media-fueled foster-care panic contribute to a child’s death in Silicon Valley?

Source: California Child Welfare Indicators Project

KEY POINTS

 ● After two children known-to-the-system died in Santa Clara County, California in 2023, Julia Prodis Sulek, a reporter for The Mercury News and Sylvia Arenas, a member of the county Board of Supervisors, rushed to scapegoat recent efforts by the county to keep families together. Arenas and Sulek had no evidence and no interest in any contrary point of view. The claim was false. 

● The result was what may well be the worst foster-care panic in decades anywhere in America. The number of children torn from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care nearly doubled in a single year, and increased by another 50% the year after. 

● In addition to the enormous harm to the children needlessly taken, the panic instigated by Arenas and The Mercury News plunged the entire system into chaos (something one of Sulek’s own stories even acknowledged – while taking no responsibility for it). That left workers no time to investigate any case, or any potential caretaker, carefully. 

● Now another child is dead. And, however unintentionally, Arenas’ demagoguery and The Mercury News’s reporting – and the shutting out of all dissent – may have contributed to that death. 

● The Imprint reports that, as a result of the skyrocketing caseload the contracted provider of family defense in Santa Clara county has decided they can no longer do quality work - so they're shutting down. That means even more children are likely to endure the trauma of needless placement.

● But instead of learning from their horrendous blunders, Arenas is doubling down – now joined by County District Attorney Jeff Rosen. Sulek’s stories are cheering them on.  Rosen is threatening prosecutions and County Executive James Williams is warning that any or all of ten child welfare agency employees placed on paid leave might be fired. Yet no scrutiny has been directed toward the role of Arenas, Rosen or The Mercury News. 

● Through it all, Arenas has reveled in humiliating the leadership of the child welfare agency, with every humiliation chronicled almost gleefully in The Mercury News. 

● This risks setting up an endless cycle of child death, foster-care panic, public humiliation, more panic, and another death. And while it was never their intent, Arenas, Rosen and The Mercury News share responsibility for the terrible consequences.

In a story on February 26, 2025, The Mercury News in San Jose and its sister papers in the Bay Area News Group quoted caseworkers describing the chaos in the county’s child welfare system: 

“The workers and supervisors are in crisis mode, triaging cases and doing the minimum when it comes to child abuse investigations,” said one worker.  Said another: 

“We have children who are placed in foster care who are not able to visit their families … We have children who are placed hundreds of miles away from their communities. We have children and families who are not adequately served because we don’t have language capacity to meet their needs. Court matters are being delayed, continued for weeks, if not months due to the influx of cases, and we don’t have any staff to handle that.”

What The Mercury-News did not tell readers is which county institution is most responsible for this chaos:

The Mercury News. 

Aided and abetted by a grandstanding member of the County Board of Supervisors, The Mercury News has set off, and continues to fuel, what is probably the worst “foster-care panic” in America in decades, perhaps ever. In the time since The Mercury News blamed the horrific deaths of three-month-old Phoenix Castro and six-year-old Jordan Walker in 2023 on a supposed fanatical desire to keep families together, the number of children torn from their families and consigned to the chaos of foster care in Santa Clara County nearly doubled in a single year, and surged another 50% in the following year. Now another child is dead – and while it was never their intent, the foster care panic that the newspaper and the politician started may well be one of the reasons why. 

● The Imprint reports that, as a result of the skyrocketing caseload, the contracted provider of family defense in Santa Clara county has decided they can no longer do quality work - so they're shutting down. That means even more children are likely to endure the trauma of needless placement.

And let’s be clear about which children are suffering most: In Santa Clara, the child population is 35% Black and Latino. The foster care population is 81% Black and Latino.    

A once-great regional newspaper hollowed out by a hedge fund appears desperate to recapture its former glory by falsely scapegoating efforts to keep families together for high-profile child abuse deaths, no matter how many children suffer in the process. Children endure the enormous inherent emotional trauma of needless separation. As a result, in typical cases, not the horror stories in which The Mercury News revels, study after study finds that children left in their own homes typically fare better in later life even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.

One recent study from Sweden found that, again in typical cases, when compared to comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes, children placed in foster care were four times more likely to die by age 20. The most common cause of death: Suicide. There’s also the high risk of abuse in foster care itself. (And though the latest tragedy took place in a kinship placement, typically kinship foster care is safer than what should be called "stranger care.") 

How many children torn needlessly from everyone they know and love during the Silicon Valley Foster Care Panic will be dead by age 20? Who will be held accountable then? 

The other price of panic 

At the same time, “triaging cases and doing the minimum” only makes it more likely that children in real danger will be overlooked. 

Now, more than a year later, the worst may have happened for that very reason. The media-fueled politician-aided Silicon Valley Foster-Care Panic may have contributed to the death of Jaxon Juarez, a toddler allegedly killed by his cousin. Everyone should have learned the obvious lesson – that tearing vast numbers of additional children from their families does not curb child abuse deaths (a lesson reinforced by a recent massive study). Instead, The Mercury News, led by reporter Julia Prodis Sulek, and grandstanding politicians, led by County Supervisor Sylvia Arenas, are doubling down, joined by a new ally, Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen. 

In its coverage, The Mercury News has been the ultimate no-dissent zone. Other than one early story, good luck finding the voice of an older child wrongly taken, the parent of such a child, or an attorney for such a parent or child.  

Something else has been missing as well: The current foster-care panic followed several years of effort to reduce needless foster care. The Mercury News has failed to tell readers that, rather than creating what the newspaper proclaims is a “child safety crisis,” the reduction in entries into foster care was accomplished with no compromise in safety, according to the standard measure used by the state and federal governments. 

A throwback to an ugly era

There was a time when this kind of news coverage was common.  A child “known-to-the-system” dies. The casefile has more “red flags” than a Soviet May Day parade. Everyone rushes to blame a supposed overemphasis on family preservation. Whether driven by the news media itself or politicians whose false message they amplified, the result was a foster-care panic – a sharp, sudden surge in children needlessly torn from their families and thrown into foster care. It’s happened in Los Angeles, of course, and also New York, Chicago, and many places in between.  

But children known-to-the-system keep suffering horrendous abuse; sometimes deaths increase because workers are now so overwhelmed they have even less time to notice the red flags. The failed, take-the-child-and-run response to the deaths of Phoenix Castro and Jordan Walker may well have contributed to the death of Jaxon Juarez. In that case, though, of course, it was never their intent, Arenas and The Mercury News share responsibility for this latest tragedy. 

In much of the country, the journalism of child welfare has matured.  At one time, The Mercury News even was a leader in getting these issues right. But now, what’s left of the newspaper has sunk to a pathetic pursuit of cheap glory.  

As a result, in the five decades I have followed child welfare, first as a journalist and author and now as an advocate, the worst foster-care panic I’ve ever seen, by far, is the one underway in Santa Clara County. When rates of child poverty are factored in, Santa Clara County now takes children from their loved ones at a rate double that of New York City and quadruple the rate of metropolitan Chicago. It’s even surpassed Los Angeles, a county once notorious for its take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare. But just days ago Arenas said that still wasn’t enough! 

Caseworkers are rushing to take away children not to protect the children, but to protect themselves from the wrath of the cheerleaders for panic, Arenas, Sulek and District Attorney Rosen, who has pledged to investigate who, besides the actual killer, “is responsible criminally, civilly, morally, ethically, and systemically for what happened in this case…” 

If that isn’t enough to terrify workers into taking almost every child in sight, ten employees who came anywhere near the latest case have been put on paid leave. County Executive James Williams declared that “Depending on the findings of our investigation, staff may face disciplinary action up to and including termination.” 

Over and over, almost from the moment Phoenix Castro died, Sulek wrote that “a Bay Area News Group investigation found that county policies favored family preservation over child safety.” And despite the mind-boggling increase in the number of children torn from their homes since then, Arenas repeated the same false claim just days ago. 

The data on child safety outcomes – data The Mercury News never shared with readers – show that the claim is false. In place of evidence, The Mercury News demonizes families the way Donald Trump demonizes immigrants – they rely on horror stories. 

They also cite a report in which the state Department of Social Services said sometimes the county got it wrong – while omitting any quotes from the county’s response. The state report made no claim that the county was putting family preservation ahead of child safety; Sulek, Arenas and their allies dreamt that up themselves. 

The Mercury News and Arenas assume that, since children are dying in cases that sure seem obvious, what else could it be other than some sort of Vast Family Preservation Conspiracy? The fact that now another child has died, even after entries into foster care skyrocketed, has not dimmed their enthusiasm for this theory. 

But most of the time, the tragedies occur because workers are overwhelmed. They must rush from case to case, so they make terrible errors in all directions. A foster-care panic only makes that worse. 

In the most recent tragedy, Jaxon was placed with a relative who had been convicted of felony child endangerment related to a DUI arrest in 2014. Her son is accused of killing Jaxon. Why might workers place a child in such a home? One possibility is that they all gathered in a conference room to brag about how they didn’t care if Jaxon was safe because all they care about is family preservation. 

A more likely possibility: With the number of children torn from their families soaring from 149 in SFY 2023 to 276 in 2024 to 421 in 2025 – they simply had no time to carefully examine the record of the relative with whom Jaxon was placed when he died or to weigh the merits of alternative placements. 

For example, other relatives, in Arizona, had said they would take Jaxon, but that would make it impossible for his father to visit. Did the workers in this case have time to weigh that option or engage in the complex process of interstate placement? At one point, Jaxon’s grandfather had custody, but couldn’t get him to visits with his father. An agency that wasn't drowning in needless removals of children could have provided the transportation, instead of changing the placement. If the foster care panic is the reason none of these alternatives was considered, then the foster care panic itself was a key factor in Jaxon’s death. 

The typical cases 

Most cases are nothing like the horror stories.  In Santa Clara County, fewer than ten percent of foster children are there because of allegations of physical or sexual abuse. More than 85% are there because of “neglect.” Sometimes that’s extremely serious. More often, it means the family is poor. 

That explains what we know thanks to the data about what happened to child safety when Santa Clara started emphasizing family preservation. The key measure used to evaluate safety is the percentage of children left in their own homes who are allegedly abused or neglected again. During the time Santa Clara County reduced foster care, that measure stayed the same.  The evidence shows that Santa Clara County saved hundreds of children from the trauma of needless separation – and the high risk of abuse in foster care itself – with no compromise of safety. 

Reveling in “an epic takedown” 

The journalism of foster-care panic is nothing new – though happily, across the country, there is less of it. But what sets the behavior of Sulek (and Arenas) apart, even from the worst examples in other cities, is what appears to be a willingness not only to see families torn apart, but an obliviousness to the consequences. The Mercury News seemed almost to gloat about getting its foster care panic – while Arenas complained early on, and again just days ago, that it still hadn’t gone far enough.  

They also seem to share a compulsion to humiliate those they see as standing in their way. Look at their behavior toward one of the few Black men to hold a position of power in Santa Clara County government – the now former director of the Department of Family and Children’s Services, Damion Wright. 

Consider the scene at a Board of Supervisors meeting in 2024, as Arenas both literally and figuratively looked down on Wright and his boss, Department of Social Services Director Daniel Little. 

As Sulek gleefully reported at the time and then reminded readers months later: 

Last summer, after an epic takedown of Wright and Little during a board meeting, Supervisor Arenas demanded they each write a “letter of reflection” about their leadership failures that led to the child safety crisis. 

Little did it. Wright, to his credit, did not, allowing him to leave with some dignity. But Sulek wasn’t through trying to strip him of that dignity. In two stories, she lamented the lack of firings, noting that 

Only Wright has resigned, and he did so on his own accord, announcing the day after Christmas that his father’s recent death — not any pressure related to the investigations — led to his departure.  

Apparently, for The Mercury News, nothing short of tarring and feathering will do. 

Arenas seems to take a Trump-style pleasure in humiliating anyone she can. A few days ago, she drove Wright’s successor, Wendy Kinnear-Rausch, to tears, suggesting Kinnear-Rausch didn’t care if “brown children” died. The Mercury News loved it. 

Through it all, Arenas has never indicated how many children must be torn from their homes before she will be satisfied. She implies that the criterion is that no child will ever die of abuse. That is always the only acceptable goal. But with nearly two million people, Santa Clara is the 18^th most populous county in America – it’s bigger than 11 states. I know of no jurisdiction of that size that has ever achieved that goal. And, as we’ve seen with the death of Jaxon Juarez, while it was never their intent, the behavior of Arenas herself, and The Mercury News, may have moved Santa Clara County farther from that goal. 

The harm to the public officials Arenas and The Mercury News have scapegoated and humiliated pales compared to the harm it’s all done to children. 

Now, Santa Clara children cry themselves to sleep hundreds of miles from everyone they know and love, others may bounce from home to home, increasing the chances that they will emerge years later unable to love or trust anyone – or die at their own hand before they turn 20. That’s even if they defy the odds – at least one in four, and probably greater – of being abused in foster care itself.  And what evidence there is, from the few jurisdictions large enough to measure, is that the odds of children in real danger being overlooked have increased – as we may have just seen in Santa Clara County itself. 

Perhaps Arenas and Sulek, and their respective colleagues, should take some time to reflect on that.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 21, 2026

● New Mexico’s Attorney General has issued a report on the state’s “child welfare” system that combines the Donald Trump approach to fearmongering with the RFK Jr. approach to science. The result is a document likely to make New Mexico’s children less safe. That’s why NCCPR has issued an in-depth rebuttal. For the tl;dr version, see our column in Source NM. 

● Speaking of dangerously wrong, over the next five years, Maryland plans to spend $1.2 billion on 637 group home and institution beds. For that kind of money, they could give more than $190,000-per-year-per-child in of help to every Maryland family from whom a child was taken away in 2024. I have a blog post about the state’s misplaced priorities. 

● I don’t know if the Maryland facility exposed in this story from WBFF-TV in Baltimore is among those getting the contracts, but it does give a good idea of what states get for all the money they lavish on “residential treatment.” 

● The Imprint reports on a survey offering new evidence that predators go where the prey is. From the story: 

In a newly released survey of attorneys working in child welfare and juvenile justice systems across the country, only about 19% said they “never or rarely” represent children who have been commercially sexually exploited. … 

“The findings are jarring: exploitation is not limited to an occasional foster child,’’ write the authors of the report. “It is embedded within the everyday work of child welfare and juvenile justice systems across the country.’’

● For decades those fanatical about tearing apart families have been obsessed with paper permanence – a narrow vision in which only formal adoption, usually by strangers, “counts” as permanence. In this version of “permanence,” children are cut off entirely from not only parents but often siblings, friends, extended family, and every other supportive human being in their lives.  Even their birth certificates are changed. Among the many awful consequences: Tens of thousands of young people who age out of foster care each year with no home at all. 

Now, current and former foster youth are leading the chorus of voices who are fighting back, and trying to teach the child welfare establishment that real permanence is relational permanence, in which every human connection that can help a child succeed is nurtured rather than severed. And now, The Washington Post reports, some of those young people have adapted a concept pioneered in Kansas into legislation pending in Washington, DC. From the story: 

The legislation, called the Soul Act — for Support, Opportunity, Unity and Legal Relationships — is part of a burgeoning national movement to transform the foster care system by allowing older teens to create a legally binding network of support. Without having to sever legal ties to birth parents, they could choose their own family by drawing on a variety of guardians, blood relatives and other trusted adults — teachers, pastors, family friends — who agree to care for the young person in specific ways. …

“One of the beautiful things about Soul is it opens up a much broader, more dynamic vision of what a family is,” said Tami Weerasingha-Cote, policy director at Children’s Law Center, which along with the Family & Youth Initiative helped the D.C. teens and young adults craft the legislation.

A Soul family also counters still another of the hideous financial incentives that a family-hating child welfare establishment has built into the system: 

Many foster teens chose to age out to take advantage of state or federal money — such as a tuition assistance or savings program — that they could not access if they were adopted or had a guardian. Under Soul, teens would not have to choose between family or benefits. They could have both.

● Mya Martinez describes herself as “a sexual assault survivor, an aged-out foster youth, a mom, a wife, and a truth teller.” Here’s some of the truth she told in The Imprint last week: 

Let’s just be honest, the foster care system never cared for children’s well-being and mental health. This made-up narrative that the system has to try and make themselves seem great and undeniably precious is fake. I, for one, am sick of it. 

● amNY and  Courthouse News Service report that advocates for children and families caught up in the system in New York are asking the state’s highest court to put a stop to a particularly insidious form of hidden foster care – or, as it should be called, sugar-frosted foster care. 

● The New Jersey Monitor reports that New Jersey is the latest state that’s going to be paying a lot of money to survivors of abuse while in the state’s “care” – as it should. 

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories Go in All Directions: 

● Keep this story from WDIV-TV Detroit in mind the next time you read about private foster care agencies seeking legislation to make it much harder for victims of abuse on their watch to get justice: 

In a lawsuit filed against Vista Maria, an all-girls facility that Local 4 began investigating over a year ago, six women and girls said the respected Dearborn Heights nonprofit that was meant to protect children instead became a “house of horrors.” 

The lawsuit -- filed April 13, 2026, by former residents and some family members on their behalf -- accuses Vista Maria and its staff of psychological and physical abuse, “sexual abuse, including sexual assault, molestation, and nonconsensual touching and harassment,” along with unsafe conditions and negligence. 

All were placed there as minors, many through the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) and court orders, the suit said. … 

“The allegations laid out by these survivors are not isolated … they reflect a long pattern of abuse and systemic failure involving young women who were placed in an environment that was supposed to protect them.” 

● From the Altoona Mirror: 

An out-of-court settlement has been reached in a case involving six children from an Altoona family who were removed by authorities from their parents almost 18 years ago and placed in foster care. The foster parents, Timothy and Barbara Krause of Houtzdale, eventually adopted the children and the youngsters were never returned to their Altoona roots. … 

Tim and Barbara Krause in 2020 were found guilty of 22 counts that included endangering the welfare of children, simple assault, terroristic threats and reckless endangerment for their treatment of all six children while in the foster home. 

The foster parents, according to the Superior Court in its review of the Krause cases, used racial slurs in referring to the children, forced the children to stand against a wall, knees bent, for long periods of time, deprived them of food for lengthy periods of time, and threatened and beat them.

Our full rebuttal to the New Mexico Attorney General's dangerously wrong report on "child Welfare"

The report on uses ugly, Trump-style tactics to stereotype families caught up in the system, shows an RFK Jr.-style disregard for science, misunderstands basic data and is likely to worsen the very failures it highlights.

Here's our full rebuttal

NCCPR in Source NM: New Mexico AG Torrez’s report on CYFD is dangerously wrong

One year ago, just as New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez was beginning his investigation of the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department, I wrote a column for Source NM published under the headline “Torrez’s CYFD investigation will fail if it leaves people out.” 

He left people out. The investigation failed. 

The result is a report that is likely to worsen problems it highlights; it may even trigger events that lead to more children dying. … 

Read the full column in Source NM

And see our full rebuttal here

Maryland’s $1.2 billion "child welfare" blunder

It turns out this agency has an enormous amount of money to spend
on institutionalizing children

That’s how much the state is likely to spend over the next five years institutionalizing kids, instead of helping their families

The tragic death of Kanaiyah Ward, a foster youth filed away and forgotten in a hotel, called attention to the fact that Maryland was dumping scores of children in similar makeshift placements. 

Kanaiyah was not in the system because her mother abused or neglected her. Her mother was desperate to get her help with her mental health problems. But because she was poor, she couldn’t go out and buy therapy the way affluent parents do. So her mother had to surrender Kanaiyah to the family police agency – a more accurate term than “child welfare” agency. 

Kanaiyah’s death could have been a wake-up call; a chance to rethink the state’s entire failed “child welfare” system. Instead, the state has come up with the worst possible response: A $1.2 billion blunder that’s bad for taxpayers, and far, far worse for children. 

The state has signed contracts with a plethora of “providers” to spend $744 million over three years to buy 637 beds for foster children, an expansion of 37 over the current number. There’s an option to spend another $496 million to extend the contracts two more years, for a total of $1.24 billion. 

The financial cost is high: 

I’m a tax-and-spend liberal and proud of it. I have no problem with the mind-boggling sum of money. But we all should have a problem with spending that money on what is almost certain to be, by far, the worst form of placement – institutionalizing children at an average cost of $675,749 per bed per year. 

That’s the financial price of institutionalizing children in group homes and so-called “residential treatment centers.” Here’s the state’s breakdown of exactly what type of beds they are:

 

Source: Maryland Dept. of Human Services

 And here’s how much the state is paying, per day, per child, to warehouse children in these places:

Source: Maryland Dept. of Human Services

The human cost is much higher:

Now consider the much greater human cost. These are places that have been shown to be rife with abuse in state after state; places where a U.S. Senate investigation found “The risk of harm to children … is endemic to the operating model.” 

Even when there is no physical or sexual abuse, they are the kinds of places that have been found to be inherently harmful to children. Study after study has found the entire approach is a failure. As the Senate investigation put it: 

[Residential treatment facilities] are costly, not as effective as community-based behavioral health treatment options, and often harmful to youth in their care. 

So what could Maryland do with all that money instead? In 2024, Maryland authorities took 1,268 children from their families and consigned them to the chaos of foster care. For that same $744 million, it could spend $195,583 per year per child on every one of those children. 

How might one spend all that money? 

Consider who these children and families really are: Of all the children torn from their families and thrown into foster care in Maryland in 2024, 87% did not involve even an allegation of sexual abuse or any form of physical abuse. In 60%, there was no allegation of any form of drug abuse -- not just no allegation of opioids or meth, no allegation of any abuse of any drug or alcohol. Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect.” You could go a long way to solving those poverty problems with $195,583 per child per year. 

But what about all those cases in which, the providers love to tell us, the children have such complex needs that no family could possibly handle them? In fact, there is nothing an institution can do that can’t be done better by bringing intensive Wraparound services right into a family home or, when placement really is necessary, a foster home. Once again, here’s a video offering a classic example. 

 

 That intervention almost certainly cost a lot less than $195,583. So imagine what the full $195,583 could do. It might not be quite enough to provide a live-in therapist for every child 24/7, but it comes pretty close – and it sure can buy a lot of intensive therapy for children and families. 

Had Kanaiyah Ward’s mother been given that kind of help, she never would have become so overwhelmed that she felt she had no choice but to surrender her daughter to the system that let her die. 

Maryland has shown it has a whole lot of money to spend on child welfare. But when it comes to guts, vision and imagination, the system is bankrupt. 

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending April 14, 2026

● A depressing number of journalists fall for the fearmongering of private foster care agencies when they say the sky will fall if they can't get insurance. Honolulu Civil Beat took a closer look, including NCCPR’s perspective. 

● In California, The Imprint reports, abuse survivors are rallying against legislation that would make it much harder to sue the agencies.

From the story: 

Angela Arroyo, 20, spoke at the rally outside the county’s Hall of Administration and called the effort “a direct attack on survivors.” 

“Don’t take away our voice and our chance at justice,” Arroyo told the crowd of about 40 people. 

Another speaker at the rally, La Defensa Executive Director Ivette Alé-Ferlito said a yes vote on proposed immunity legislation is "choosing to protect institutions over survivors.” 

In addition to proposals to curb survivor access to justice, private foster care agencies in California already have received one taxpayer bailout, and as I discussed in Cal Matters, they’re trying for another.

● There’s been some improvement in Maine. The number of children trapped in foster care has declined – from obscene to merely outrageous. I have a blog post about it. 

● The New York Daily News has an excellent story about how … 

After Mayor Mamdani passed over their top choice to lead the city’s child welfare system, New York parents whose lives were upended by foster care want answers on how he plans to help keep Black families together. 

● Also in the New York Daily News: Joyce McMillan of JMAC For Families is co-author of an oped column that begins this way: 

In creating a new mayoral Office of Community Safety, Mayor Mamdani has taken a major step toward reshaping policing. The office will respond to certain non-violent emergencies and strengthen the social safety net to prevent crises before they happen. 

That same approach is exactly what we and many other advocates have called for in “family policing” — how the city intervenes in families with the intention of keeping children safe. 

That’s why McMillan and other advocates want to see New York 

create an Office of Family Well-Being to help enhance family safety and security, improve children’s health and wellness across their life span, close gaps that lead to family crises and reduce ACS intervention, and contribute to community safety. The office would focus on neighborhood-based supports that keep children safe by preventing family challenges from becoming crises. 

But perhaps most interesting is McMillan’s Co-author: Kimberly Watson, president and CEO of Graham – formerly Graham Windham – a 220-year-old private child welfare agency. For at least 200 of those years, they were part of the problem. Now they’re becoming part of the solution. That’s one more for my mental list of “I never thought I would see it in my lifetime” moments. 

● In New Jersey, a task force has issued a series of recommendations to curb mandatory child abuse reporting.  As Advocates for Children of New Jersey explains: 

The report examines how current reporting and response practices can unintentionally harm children and families by confusing poverty with neglect. Using national research, data, and lived experience, it provides a roadmap for aligning child welfare policy with evidence-based approaches that support family stability, child wellbeing, and community strength. 

The recommendations are far too modest, but there was a time when ACNJ was the biggest cheerleader for a take-the-child-and-run approach in that state. So the fact that ACNJ is behind this makes for still another one of those “I never thought I’d see it in my lifetime” moments. 

And speaking of such moments: 

● Fifty years ago this month, I turned in to my professors my final project for the “Broadcast Workshop” at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism – a radio documentary about foster care. I didn’t know it would set the course for most of my professional life. Some reflections, 50 years later.